mizChartreuse || redefiningSuccess

Remember these things in elementary school? Acrostics? Acronyms? Mnemonics?

My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Plutos.

However, as science is constantly redefining what a planet is, according to this report, we will have 12 planets in our solar system. Remember when they (who the hell are ‘they,’ anyway?) said that Pluto wasn’t a planet? So now it is? When was that? Anyway, that article was written in 2006 so I’m sure something has changed since then.

“If the proposed resolution is passed, the 12 planets in our solar system will be Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres (described as a “dwarf planet” because it is smaller than Mercury), Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Charon and 2003 UB313. The latter three are plutons.”

So we could say:
Madame, Very Eager Men Can Jeopardize Some Unions; Nervous People Can 2!

Ah, nevermind. Upon further research I stumbled across this Wired article saying that Pluto, Charon, and 2003 UB313 are classified as “dwarf planets.” So forget the old news I have above.

Let’s get back down to Earth.

It looks pretty decent sized compared to these planets:

“Venus ain’t got nothin’ on us!” Ben said.

Now look at the earth in proportion to the sun. Little baby planet earth! We really are merely a speck of dust (even less) in comparison.

You’ve heard of Sirius, I’m sure. No, not the radio station, the star.
Sirius, Pollux, and Arcturus are stars that far surpass the sun in size. Yowza.

I will admit, I did not know that Sirius was a star. It’s white! Why is it white? I don’t know anything about the cosmos.

You might think that that big honker Arcturus was huge, but look at THESE hot mamas:

So no, Kanye West is NOT the biggest star in the universe. Stupid fool.

If you are interested or intrigued at all, here is a video showing stars even bigger than Arcturus. And for good measure, this is the website where I found these pictures of the planets in scale of size. And for even more good measure, I just want to say that Frogger, the blogger, is how I stumbled across this planet website in the first place.

And this is an excerpt from Cosmic Voyage, a film that came out quite a while ago.

Weight is basically gravity’s pull on your body. Obviously it’s proportionate to your total mass. That is the reason why people float in space or can hop around lightly on the moon (was that moon-walking thing even real? I remember hearing it was staged, but I don’t know). I wonder what it’s like to walk on Pluto. Can you walk on Pluto, or would you be so light that you’d just hover above the ground? I remember I wanted to be an astronaut when I was in third grade. This shiz is interesting. And also B-A-N-A-N-A-S.

So. With the universe being so big, isn’t it quite likely that there is something else out there? Is it megalomaniacal for us to think that our little insignificant speck of dust we call a planet is the ONLY place where life exists and thrives in our entire galaxy? If there IS life on other planets and in other galaxies, are they sized in proportion to their planets? Maybe there are people or whatever sort of life forms that are so big, we look like ants in comparison.

Is it really a small world after all?

No.

“It’s a tiny, tiny world…”